When our child can’t sit still, gets upset, runs everywhere or doesn’t want to listen to us anymore, we tend to tell them “calm down!” But this sentence is counterproductive.
Children undergo their emotions, they are not able to stop them, they are completely overwhelmed by their immature brain. In the case of anger, if the child has not reached his “peak” of emotion, there is still time to be able to regulate it. On the other hand, if we invite the child to try to suppress his emotions, he will experience this as violence within himself, and at a certain point the emotion will end up coming out in an explosive way.
So it is better, as an adult, to play this haven of safety and empathy to make the child understand that emotions are friends that allow them to adapt to the world around them. Regulating emotions is a learning process that can be carried out throughout life, including in adulthood.
Author, speaker and content creator on his media Papapositive.fr, Jean-François Belmonte explains on his site that when someone tells us “calm down”, we don’t know how or what our interlocutor means by that when he tells us to calm down.
Maybe it is the adult who at that precise moment is so upset that he no longer knows how to calm down? Stress is contagious and we tend to judge the outside world based on how we feel ourselves. So, “calm down” can turn into “Am I calm myself? What’s going on inside me? Are my needs…
- Femina.fr
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